n very much encouraged by the sinking of the
three British cruisers, _Hague_, _Cressy_, and _Aboukir_ in the North
Sea, by the _Emden's_ famous raid in the Indian Ocean, by von Spee's
victory at Coronel in the Pacific, and by the way the Kaiser and all
the German papers boasted. In 1915 they were encouraged by the French
and British failure against the Turks and Germans at the Dardanelles.
In 1916, however, they began to feel the pinch of the British blockade
so badly that they were eager for a sea-fight that would ease it off.
If they had the finest navy in the world, why didn't it wipe the Grand
Fleet off the North Sea altogether? At the same time the British
public and the Allies wanted to know why the Grand Fleet didn't wipe
the Germans off.

We have just seen why the Grand Fleet could not force on a battle round
the German base. But the reason why the Germans could not try to
snatch a victory out of some lucky chance at the beginning of the war,
when the odds were least against them, was of quite a different kind.
The fact was that thousands of their trained seamen were hopelessly cut
off from Germany by the British Navy. Nearly every German merchant
ship outside of the North Sea or the Baltic was either taken by the
British or chased into some neutral port from which it never got out.
The crews were mostly reservists in the German Navy. They were ready
for the call to arms. But they could not answer it. So new men had to
be trained. Meanwhile the one good chance slipped away; for by the
time these recruits had been trained the Grand Fleet had grown much
stronger than before.

On the 31st of May, 1916, Jellicoe's whole force was making one of its
regular "drives" across the North Sea in two huge but handy fleets.
The Battle Cruiser Fleet under Beatty was fifty miles south of the
Battle Fleet, which was under Jellicoe himself. Jellicoe and Beatty,
the chosen leaders of the greatest fleet of the greatest navy in the
greatest war in the world, had long been marked men. They were old
friends, having fought side by side against the Boxer rebellion in
China in 1900, the year the German Navy Bill was passed by the German
Parliament on purpose to endanger the "mightiest" of foreign
navies--that is, the British. They had both been wonderfully keen
students of every branch of naval warfare, from the handling of a
single gun or ship to the supreme art of handling this "mightiest" of
fleets; and both they and Sir